Who Do You Help? by Randy Knoewman is an accessible literary fiction novel that tackles weighty moral questions with the kind of straightforward clarity you’d expect from a book assigned in a high school English class, and I mean that as a compliment. The premise is simple but compelling: Mr. Jones, a quiet widower in small-town Illinois, wins the lottery and loses his wife Pam to cancer in quick succession. Before she dies, Pam leaves him with a challenging directive: help as many people as possible, but don’t just throw money at cancer research. What follows is an honest exploration of what it actually means to do good.
The book is told through multiple points of view, primarily Mr. Jones, but also his daughter Sarah, the waitress Linda, and his cousin Bradley. While this structure gives us different ethical perspectives, it’s Mr. Jones that anchors the story. Each character feels genuinely human and relatable, like people you would meet in real life. It’s definitely a book that prefers realism over exciting scenes. There is little in the way of dramatic confrontations or sudden twists. Instead, the tension comes from watching ordinary people navigate hard choices with limited information and conflicting loyalties.
The book is engaging and easy to read, with Knoewman’s prose doing exactly what it needs to without drawing attention to itself. The novel trusts that the plot premise is compelling enough on its own without manufacturing artificial drama. The pacing is gentle, almost meditative, which suits the subject matter. The writing stays out of its own way, letting the characters and their dilemmas take center stage. Knoewman writes the kind of sentences you don’t notice until you stop and realize how much they’ve communicated with so few words.
If there’s a weakness, it’s that the moral message can feel a little too obvious at times. The book doesn’t leave much room for ambiguity about its central thesis. There’s no morally clean way to live in an unequal world, but refusing to choose is also a choice. It’s a good message, an important one, even, but the novel sometimes feels like it’s underlining its points rather than trusting the reader to find them. The title itself, Who Do You Help?, isn’t exactly subtle.
That said, the message and themes are of course deeply worth engaging with. Knoewman refuses to offer easy answers or feel-good resolutions. The plot premise, namely how would you help people if given this windfall, and what would be the best way to do it, is thought-provoking. The novel earns its serious tone by refusing to let Mr. Jones off the hook or provide him with a tidy solution, and tackling these topics with nuance.
I also found it a bit thought-provoking the point the book made about how simply donating to cancer research and that kind of thing may not be the best thing to do in this situation, “Over five billion dollars is spent on cancer research. Five billion. That doesn’t even include charitable donations, and, look, I want cancer cured too, but it feels like every fucking fundraiser is about cancer.” It’s the sort of book that after you’ve read you will want to discuss in book club, and wonder what you would do if you came into a large amount of money.
Overall, Who Do You Help? is a very enjoyable book for fans of character-driven literary fiction with a moral backbone. Readers who appreciate authors like John Williams or Marilynne Robinson will find a lot to like here. It belongs to that rare genre of novel that stays with you not necessarily because of what happens, but because of what it makes you think about long after you’ve finished. Lastly, I particularly appreciate the author providing a couple of charities to donate to at the end.
Final verdict: A thoughtful, accessible novel that asks hard questions about charity and how to help others without pretending to have all the answers. Despite occasionally obvious messaging, it’s a compelling debut that treats doing good as the complicated, uncomfortable burden it actually is. For fans of writers like Fredrik Backman.
You can get your copy of Who Do You Help? here!
